For those who have the same warped sense of humour this Letter can also be had in French.
(Complaints can be addressed to the Blog Council, your nearest newspaper, radio or TV station and when you leave this blog remember to pull the chain)
*Terms & Conditions Apply, if you can find them.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

TELKOM SCUPPERS ANOTHER KEVIN PEARMAN GET-RICH-QUICK SCHEME

Dear Readers,

Hundreds of people promised lucrative jobs in another of Kevin Pearman’s
get-rich-quick businesses have been left without them.

And what happened to the money South
African investors might have given him is anyone’s guess.

HIS INVESTORS ARE TIRED OF HIS EMPTY PROMISES.

A Facebook page has recently been set
up headed “Kevin Pearman Scams Ntyre Itmakescents.”
It has nothing to do with me but claims to have been founded by “a social group
dedicated to getting all the people together that Kevin Pearman has taken money
off.”

Last month in a Sunday Times
advertisement he was telling would be investors that he could turn their
R50 000 into R200 000 in a year. It was “the
best passive incomeopportunity ever,”he claimed.

He has given similar undertakings
before.

It was dependent on the success of the
contract to market mobile airtime that his The World Loves a Winner company trading as It Makes Cents (IMC) had with Telkom.

The
only problem was that after IMC signed up 4 532 agents in only three
months up to December last year, if the website is to be believed, and “created
6 288 jobs since 1 September 2014” Telkom
terminated the agreement. This was confirmed to me by a Telkom spokesman.

Had Kevin’s “tarnished
image” caught up with him once again?

Telkom was the second mobile phone provider to sign a
marketing agreement with Pearman only to cancel it. He had a another one with
Cell C which was revoked three days after I asked the then Chief Executive Alan
Knott - Craig if the scheme had Cell C’s blessing.

At the time Pearman was told that Cell
C believed his marketing plan was a “get-rich-quick
pyramid scheme” which he denied.

Pearman maintained that by selling Cell
C sim cards his agents could “easily make
R800 000 per annum or get therequicker.”
Agents had to pay R600 to get started and Pearman had recruited 140 of them
before Cell C reneged on the agreement.

Many of those recruited for Telkom were poor people lured by Kevin’s pie in the sky
predictions that his firm would sponsor and train agents to start their own
businesses in which they could earn “at least R300 000
per annum.”

The firm’s website, which was
effectively taken down soon after I began making inquiries, stated that the
business had two sides: the Passive Income-Opportunity
Participants (PI) and the agents who were responsible for bringing in the money
by selling Telkom airtime.

For every PI there were to be five
agents contracted to meet an “easily obtainable,
minimum performance.” After IMC took its cut the money earned would be
split between the agents and paying the investors.

He
also undertook to pay the agents and his PI investors monthly, something that hasn’t happened.

Keith Buncombe,
who became an agent in August last year and who has 60 subagents under him told
me, “Nobody hasgot
paid any money yet.”

Buncombe, a pastor at a small Port Elizabeth church, was trying to boost
his income. He said that in
September last year he received 3 000 Telkom
sim cards after he and other agents had been on a two day Telkom training course. These went quickly and in
December he got another 3 000.

When
I spoke to him on 11 February this year Pearman had not yet let him know that
IMC was no longer an authorised Telkom
vendor.

Buncombe
was one of the praise singers in a video competition
on the IMC website extolling the virtues of the business and Pearman’s
expertise. He described Pearman as an “absolute
genius.” But I don’t think he is so convinced of this now. He won second
prize of R2 500.

FIKISWA MABANDLA

First prize of R5 000 went to Fikiswa
Mabandla fromPort Elizabeth. She said It Makes Cents would
change so many people’s lives “especially in the Eastern Cape where
there’s so much unemployment.”

The third prize winner was Wally
Scholtz who told of how he had signed up 41 distributors in just nine days. “I
have a goal to become financially
free,” he added.

The IMC January 2015 news letter revealed that Xybanetx,
a leading management advisory firm had become
a “shareholder/partner.” Its impressive pedigree doesn’t fit with the Kevin
Pearman image. It has done consultancy work for firms like Absa bank, Nedbank,
Standard Bank as well as Daimler Chrysler, Ster Kinekor Theatres and various other
blue chip companies.

Craig Lutwyche

In an effort to verify the News
Letter’s claim I sent emails to both Craig
Lutwyche and Carlo Mariani,
Xybanetx’s founding directors. They never replied although their PA Jennifer
Sagnelli assured me she had alerted them to my inquiry.

Pearman was just as elusive.

Carlo Mariani

The News Letter disclosed that IMC
would be applying for a license as a Financial Services Provider (FSP) and would
be adding life insurance and funeral policies as well as medical aid schemes to
the portfolios of its agents.

The PI will cease with the inclusion of
the new partners and will be replaced with an Investment Opportunity that will
provide a fixed, guaranteed return for a year. This will form part of the
financial services offered when the company
gets its FSP license. But it will provide nowhere near the income available from
the current PI model.

If Pearman or any of his companies gets an FSP license it will be a disgrace.

FROM THE FACEBOOK PAGE

Kevin specialises in get-rich-quick
offers through advertisements in the Sunday Times and possibly other papers. It
is doubtful however whether anybody who has invested with him has got the
returns promised or even had their
money back.

The first one I came across was for a
shareholding in his N-tyre Solutions that owns his a tyre monitoring invention
for trucks. This was said to have an enormous tyre saving potential. So much so
that Pearman told me that one of the world’s largest tyre manufacturers offered
him $10-million for the rights so they could prevent it coming
on the market. Inexplicably he turned
this down to market his baby himself.

That was 12 years ago shortly after he
won three design awards for his invention. Ever since then he has been
struggling to get what was described as a “brilliant concept” on the road to
make him and his shareholders the millions he believes it is worth.

In the Sunday Times he promised that an investment of R100 000 in N-Tyre
would be worth R2-million in four years.

I once told him that although he
believed his schemes were great investments he still resorted to very dubious
advertisements in the Sunday Times. He replied, “The
ST isrudely expensive and I simply must do
whatever I can to get to talk to people.”

Pearman’s next advertisement enticed
people to doubled R50 000 in a year. This was in his Heat in a Click
venture that sold reusable gel heating pads for muscle pain relief.

He told me he went into this towards
the end of 2012 to raise sufficient money to “finalise
my N-Tyre business and torectify my already
tarnished name.”

His The World Loves a Winner company was offering licensing agreements at R300 000
(a favourite number of his) a time.

Not long afterwards he said he had cut
ties with Heat in a Click because of a disagreement with the other partners.

The
Blue Bulls rugby club was persuaded to allow its logo to be used on the pads.
But the club never made a cent out of this.

Darryl Kroll the club’s brand promoter told me that they cancelled the contract and
although they were owed a lot of money they could never get in touch with the
people involved despite “months and months of trying.”

Last year Pearman said he started as a
Cell C reseller “out of necessity to raise the R2-million I need to launch
N-tyre myself as the potential is now better than ever with the strong possibility
of the insurance industry embracing it.”

His efforts to find a large company to back his tyre invention had proved
fruitless.

At this stage he stated he had 450
N-tyre shareholders, although none of them appeared to have had any return for
their money.

The world does love a winner but so far Kevin
Pearman has proved he is not one of them. And it’s extremely doubtful if
anybody who believed in any of his get-rich-quick promises
ever became one either.

If any of you put money in Kevin’s
latest project don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Yours faithfully,

Jon,
the Consumer Watchdog that tells you about people like Pearman when the main
stream Media doesn’t bother and happily takes his advertisements.

No comments:

Post a Comment

twitter

tweet

About Me

I was born in South Africa just before the Boer War whenever that was?
Started life with a golden spoon in my mouth which made eating rather difficult as a result I was under nourished as a child.
Went to a posh school where I only got moved up a class when my old man donated another sight screen for the cricket pitch.
Career prospects were dismal and I was once turned down for a job in the London sewers. "Too highly qualified;"that’s what they said.
I became a journalist when the Police Force wouldn’t have me.
Like most journos I know nothing about everything but I still write about it.
I decided to have my own blog so I wouldn't have to drink with the editor for hours on end to get my stuff published when according to my independent assessment it’s always of great news value.
My religious beliefs are: You only die once so remember, "You can’t be serious and Have Fun."
NEWS FLASH: I've just been appointed the Poor Man's Press Ombudsman by Presidential Decree (Not to be confused with the PRESS COUNCIL OF SOUTH AFRICA'S, SA Press Ombudsman)